In recent months, the eminent economist Alan Blinder has been making waves with article arguing that offshoring represents a serious economic threat that may genuinely degrade the conditions of the American workforce. Blinder reprised those arguments in a Washington Post op-ed this weekend, where he complained that "lately, I'm being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades."
Reading this, Kevin says,"I'm squinting to detect any apostasy here, but I just can't find it. In fact, this sounds like very standard mainstream liberal economic advice. Is Blinder seriously suggesting that it's apostasy in the economics profession merely to point out that some people will be hurt by offshoring, and that we ought to think about helping them? That's hard to believe."
But true nonetheless. It's not that such ideas are an empirical apostasy, that mentioning them at lunch with some economists will cause your tablemates to scarf down their ham-and-cheese sandwiches and dash back to the safety of office hours. It's that making a public issue out of the dark side of globalization puts you on the wrong team.
